Nobel Prizes: Year In Review 2015

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The 2015 Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to the coalition of Tunisian civil society organizations known as the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet (Quartet du Dialogue National). The Norwegian Nobel Committee commended the group “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.” Formed in July of 2013 by the alliance of four existing groups—the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT; Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail), the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA; Union Tunisienne de l’Industrie, du Commerce et de l’Artisanat), the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LTDH; La Ligue Tunisienne pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme), and the National Order of Lawyers (Ordre National des Avocats de Tunisie)—the quartet was credited with stabilizing Tunisia in the wake of threats to the progress that followed the dissolution of Pres. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s government in January 2011.

Ben Ali had been in power since 1987 and was widely viewed as a de facto dictator. Protests against his regime began in earnest following the December 2010 self-immolation of a fruit vendor who, like many other Tunisians, had been the victim of abuse by authorities. Spurred by that act of defiance, the vendor’s fellow citizens turned out in droves to call attention to the impoverished conditions, widespread unemployment, and government corruption that plagued the country. Confrontations with security police turned violent, resulting in the deaths of numerous protesters. The ensuing outcry led to Ben Ali’s flight to Saudi Arabia and the formation of a Constituent Assembly in October 2011. Hailed as the “Jasmine Revolution,” the uprising was credited with spurring similar protests across the Middle East.

The Assembly presided over a period of relative stability until 2013. Secular interests grew increasingly concerned about efforts by the dominant Islamist Nahdah Party and its allies to enshrine Islam as the national religion and their failure to discourage Islamic radicalism. In February and July, respectively, the secular politicians Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi were assassinated, likely by Muslim extremists. The latter assassination led to the withdrawal of 65 opposition members, already dissatisfied by an interim constitution introduced in June, from the 217-member Assembly, as well as renewed street protests calling for the entire Assembly’s ouster. In late July the UGTT, a 750,000-member labour union, renewed its yearlong call for the formation of a caretaker government and the initiation of wide-ranging talks aimed at democratically resolving the interests of the competing factions. Amid swelling protests from both secularist and Islamist factions in August, the UGTT was joined by its long-standing opponent, the industrialist UTICA, and then by the human rights league and the order of lawyers. Though secular opposition politicians initially refused to negotiate until the Assembly was dissolved, and the Islamist Nahdah majority would not come to the table, fearing a coup such as the one that in July had removed the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government in Egypt, by September the quartet had initiated discussions for a roadmap to resolve the crisis. The roadmap was ultimately signed by the necessary parties in October. The agreement brokered by the quartet culminated in the selection in December 2013 of a new prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, and the signing of a new constitution in January 2014. In a nod to the society that the quartet represented, the Nobel committee further explained its selection, stating that “the prize is intended as an encouragement to the Tunisian people, who despite major challenges have laid the groundwork for a national fraternity which the Committee hopes will serve as an example to be followed by other countries.”

Prize for Economics

In 2015 the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to British-American economist Angus Deaton “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” Deaton’s fundamental contributions to the theory of consumption, savings, and the measurement of economic well-being transformed the field of applied and development economics.

Angus Stewart Deaton was born on Oct. 19, 1945, in Edinburgh. He received a B.A. (1967), an M.A. (1971), and a Ph.D. (1974), each in economics, from the University of Cambridge. He worked as a professor of econometrics at the University of Bristol from 1976 until 1983 while serving as a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1979–80. In 1983 he became a permanent member of the faculty at Princeton.

Deaton’s first major contribution to the field of development economics was his analysis of the evolution of consumer demand in the U.K. over the first 70 years of the 20th century, using a novel way of modeling consumer demand. For that work he became in 1978 the first recipient of the Frisch Medal an award given every two years by the Econometric Society to the author of an applied-economics paper published in the economics journal Econometrica. In 1980, with his colleague John Muellbauer, he extended that work and came up with a model of consumer demand that was simple to estimate and relied on more-realistic assumptions than the existing models at the time. That new model, which they called the Almost Ideal Demand System, quickly became the benchmark model for economists who wanted to study consumer behaviour empirically.

Over time, Deaton’s research interests expanded to a much-broader set of areas within economics, including consumer savings, measurement of economic well-being and poverty, and health and development economics. In his study of consumer savings, he made the puzzling empirical discovery that consumption behaviour does not fluctuate very much when people are affected by income shocks. Over time, that phenomenon came to be called the Deaton Paradox, and it was instrumental in spurring a rapid expansion of research into the careful study, both theoretical and empirical, of consumer behaviour in economics.

In 1983 Deaton was appointed Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs and professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. In 2001 he became a member of the Chief Economist’s Advisory Council of the World Bank, and in 2007 he became a senior research scientist for the Gallup Organization. He served as the president of the American Economic Association in 2009 and received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2012, a prize that acknowledged his fundamental contributions to the field. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014 and to the National Academy of Sciences in early 2015.

Deaton produced scores of working papers and other publications, notably ones regarding his research on poverty in India, as well as articles and reviews for such periodicals as Science and The Lancet. His books include Economics and Consumer Behavior (1980; with Muellbauer), Understanding Consumption (1992; from the 1991 Clarendon Lectures in Economics), and The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (2013).

Prize for Literature

The 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Belarusian journalist and prose writer Svetlana Alexievich, a Russian-language author of meticulously crafted works of depth and introspection that provided a compelling and uncompromising portrayal of the social and political upheaval within the former Soviet Union from the postwar era to the fall of communism. One of a minority of laureates recognized as a dedicated writer of nonfiction, Alexievich devised a hybrid literary genre that evolved as “the closest possible approximation to real life,” wherein human voices were allowed to speak for themselves about the main events of the age. Her body of work constituted “a living history” of Soviet and post-Soviet culture that provoked controversy and official repudiation. Labeled a dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments, she experienced intimidation as well as harassment: her writing was subjected to censorship or banned from publication; she was publicly denounced for “defamation” and “slander”; and her opposition to the political regime in Belarus forced her into an extended period of self-imposed exile. The first Belarusian author and the 14th woman to win the literature prize, Alexievich was cited by the Swedish Academy “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Svetlana Alexievich

Kyodo/AP Images

Alexievich was born on May 31, 1948, in Stanislav, Ukraine, U.S.S.R. (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukr.). She was the daughter of a Belarusian father in military service and a Ukrainian mother. After her father was demobilized, the family moved to Belarus (then part of the U.S.S.R.), where both her parents were employed as teachers. From 1967 to 1972 she studied journalism at the University of Minsk; afterward she worked as a reporter in Byaroza, Brest region, near the Polish border, and then in Minsk. Influenced by the oral tradition of Russian storytelling and the innovative literary reportage of prominent contemporary authors Ales Adamovich and Artyom Borovik, she blended journalism and literature as a means to create what she described as “a history of human feelings.” Deemed unpatriotic and seditious by authorities, her early works remained unpublished until the political reformation in the mid-1980s initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing policy of perestroika. In 1985 Alexievich published U voyny ne zhenskoe litso (War’s Unwomanly Face, 1988), an investigative study that chronicled the lives of Soviet women during World War II, followed that same year by Poslednie svideteli (“The Last Witnesses”), a collection of reminiscences of war as seen through the eyes of children. Based on detailed research and interviews with hundreds of women, U voyny ne zhenskoe litso earned widespread critical recognition and established her reputation as an “oral historian” of collective identity. Alexievich designated the publication as the first volume of a literary cycle, Voices of Utopia, which was designed to depict life in the Soviet Union through what people “thought, understood and remembered.”

Published in 1990, Tsinkovye malchiki (Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War, 1992; also translated as Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, 1992) exposed the hidden, undocumented futility of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979–89) and served to demystify the role of nationalism and Soviet autonomy. The title referred to the zinc coffins used by the military to return the Soviet dead. In 1997 she published Chernobylskaya molitva: khronika budushchego (Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future, 1999; also translated as Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, 2005), which confronted the devastating consequences of the Chernobyl disaster as told by witnesses and victims of the catastrophic nuclear-power-station accident. She enlarged the scope of her creative vision with the publication in 2013 of Vremya sekond chend (“Secondhand Time”), which examined the legacy of communism in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union.

As a writer Alexievich achieved international stature and garnered numerous literary awards, notably the Kurt Tucholsky Prize (1996), the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (1998), the Herder Prize (1999), the Sandro Onofri Prize (2002), the National Book Critics Circle Award (2005), the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression (2007), the Angelus Central European Literature Award (2011), and the Prix Médicis Essai (2013). Determined to capture and preserve the essence of humanity from the stories of those who lived through the events that shaped the history of the former Soviet Union and modern-day Belarus, Alexievich perceived her craft as a literary art that reflected the struggle for truth, dignity, and self-worth. She explained, “This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.”

Prize for Chemistry

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2015 went to Swedish biochemist Tomas Lindahl, Turkish American biochemist Aziz Sancar, and American biochemist Paul Modrich, each of whom elucidated a key mechanism of DNA repair—the process by which living organisms preserve their genetic integrity. Together the scientists’ three mechanisms—Lindahl’s base excision repair, Sancar’s nucleotide excision repair, and Modrich’s mismatch repair—provided valuable insight into how cells function and survive. The new information ultimately proved critical in furthering scientists’ understanding of genetic mutations and processes underlying cancer, opening the path to the development of novel cancer therapies.

Paul Modrich

Duke University Photography

Tomas Lindahl

Facundo Arrizabalaga—EPA/Alamy

Aziz Sancar

Max Englund/UNC Health Care

Tomas Robert Lindahl was born on Jan. 28, 1938, in Stockholm. He earned a Ph.D. (1967) and an M.D. (1970) from the Karolinska Institute, where he also was a member of the faculty. In 1981, after a brief period at the University of Gothenburg, Lindahl joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (later Cancer Research UK) in London. From 1986 to 2005 he served as the director of the ICRF’s Clare Hall Laboratories (later part of the Francis Crick Institute) near Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.

Sancar was born on Sept. 8, 1946, in Savur, Mardin, Tur. He received an M.D. (1969) from the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine. In 1973, after briefly serving as a local physician near Savur, he went to the University of Texas at Dallas, where he earned a Ph.D. (1977). He joined (1982) the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, where he became the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Paul Lawrence Modrich was born in 1946 in Raton, N.M. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1968) from MIT and a Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford University. He joined (1976) the faculty of Duke University, where he became (1988) the James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry.

By the mid-20th century, scientists had realized that cells have a remarkable capacity for correcting damage sustained by DNA. It was clear that cells rely on safeguard mechanisms to prevent the incorporation of full-blown mutations into DNA, though virtually nothing was known about specific mechanisms of DNA repair. Of particular interest to Lindahl was figuring out how cells cope with endogenous DNA damage, in which spontaneous and potentially mutagenic lesions affect individual DNA bases (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) at a rate of thousands per day. He discovered two enzymes that are central to the repair of base lesions: DNA glycosylase, which locates and removes the damaged base from the strand of DNA, and apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) endonuclease, which introduces a cut at the site. In the following decades, Lindahl identified other enzymes involved in the removal and replacement of damaged bases, eventually elucidating the steps in the base excision repair pathway. His findings shed light on the significance of DNA repair in disease, especially cancer, in which DNA-repair proteins often are dysfunctional.

Sancar’s studies of DNA repair focused initially on enzymes in Escherichia coli bacteria. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he purified genes known as uvrA, uvrB, and uvrC. The genes encode subunits of a DNA repair factor in E. coli known as uvrABC nuclease (excision nuclease). Sancar successfully reconstituted the genes in vitro and characterized the excision repair function of the nuclease. He discovered that it targets DNA with lesions induced specifically by exposure to chemicals or ultraviolet radiation and makes incisions at both ends of the damaged region, facilitating the removal of the damaged nucleotides from the DNA strand. Sancar later also characterized a human excision nuclease and other molecules in human cells that are involved in nucleotide excision repair and described a role for dysfunctional nucleotide excision repair in the neurodegenerative condition xeroderma pigmentosum.

While Sancar was turning to the study of DNA repair factors in E. coli, Modrich set out to explore base-pair mismatches in the bacterium’s DNA. Base-pair mismatches occur when noncomplementary bases align with one another in double-stranded DNA (e.g., adenine is paired with cytosine rather than thymine). In E. coli, base-pair mismatches are introduced during homologous recombination (a process of DNA exchange between two identical or nearly identical strands of DNA). Modrich developed a means of analyzing such mismatches in E. coli, enabling him to identify the signal for the initiation of mismatch repair. Modrich later deduced the mechanism and components of mismatch repair in human cells and characterized the involvement of mismatch repair deficiency in hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer (Lynch syndrome) and certain neurodegenerative conditions.

Prize for Physics

The 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Canadian physicist Arthur McDonald, professor emeritus at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont., and Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo for their discovery of neutrino “oscillations.” Those tiny changes, which teams led by McDonald and Kajita detected independently, proved that neutrinos, very small subatomic particles that have no electric charge, do have mass.

Arthur McDonald

Fred Chartrand—CP/AP Images

Takaaki Kajita

AFLO/Alamy

Arthur Bruce McDonald was born on Aug. 29, 1943, in Sydney, N.S. He studied physics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. (B.Sc., 1964; M.Sc., 1965), and at Caltech (Ph.D., 1969). He returned to Canada to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario, where he remained on the research staff until 1982. After spending several years (1982–89) as a professor at Princeton University, he joined the faculty at Queen’s University, becoming emeritus in 2013.

Takaaki Kajita was born on March 9, 1959, in Higashimatsuyama, Saitama prefecture, Japan. He received a bachelor’s degree from Saitama University (1981) and a doctorate from the University of Tokyo (1986). He joined the University of Tokyo’s International Center for Elementary Particle Physics in 1986, and two years later he became associated with the university’s Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, where he was named director in 2008.

The discoveries of McDonald and Kajita had their roots in the solar neutrino problem, one of the great puzzles of 20th-century physics. The nuclear reactions inside the Sun that produce its light also give off billions of neutrinos, which come in three “flavours”: electron, muon, and tau. Because those particles weakly interact with matter, they are very difficult to detect. In the 1960s American physicist Raymond Davis set up the first experiment to detect solar electron-neutrinos, underground in the Homestake gold mine in Lead, S.D. (Neutrino experiments have to be underground to avoid contamination by cosmic rays.) After years of painstaking measurement, Davis discovered that the number of neutrinos observed in the Homestake detector was much lower than expected. That deficit came to be known as the solar neutrino problem. It was predicted, however, that if the neutrino did have a small mass, it could “oscillate,” or change flavours—e.g., from electron to muon or tau.

In 1986 Kajita began working at Kamiokande II, a neutrino observatory located in a zinc mine near Hida that included a tank containing 3,000 tons of water. On the rare occasions when a neutrino collided with a molecule of water, an electron was formed. That electron would travel faster than the speed of light in water (i.e., 75% of the speed of light in a vacuum) and generate a burst of light that would be observed by detectors on the side of the tank. Kamiokande II could also observe muon-neutrinos generated by cosmic rays when they entered the atmosphere. In 1988 Kajita and colleagues found that there were fewer of those muon-neutrinos than expected. They confirmed that result in 1992 and suggested that that deficit might have resulted from the oscillation of muon-neutrinos into tau-neutrinos. Two years later they found slightly more muon-neutrinos coming down from the atmosphere than moving up from Earth. Super-Kamiokande, a 50,000-ton observatory, replaced Kamiokande II in 1996, and in 1998 Kajita and his team confirmed that more muon-neutrinos came down than went up. Because neutrinos almost never interact with matter, there should have been no angle effect, and Kajita’s team expected to identify just as many neutrinos coming down as going up. However, since those going up from Earth had traveled a greater distance, they would have had time in which to oscillate into tau-neutrinos.

In 1989 McDonald became the first director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), which included a tank containing 1,000 tons of heavy water and was located in a nickel mine near Sudbury, Ont. The SNO apparatus, which began operations in 1999 after nine years of construction, was able to detect all three kinds of neutrinos. In 2001 and 2002 McDonald and the SNO team reported that there were just as few electron-neutrinos from the Sun as Davis had observed. When the muon- and tau-neutrinos were included, however, the deficit was made up, which indicated that the electron-neutrinos had oscillated into muon- and tau-neutrinos.

Prize for Physiology or Medicine

The 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists for their discoveries relating to new therapies that became critical in the fight against some of the world’s most-devastating parasitic infections. Chinese scientist and phytochemist Tu Youyou won for her role in the isolation and study of qinghaosu, a substance more widely known as artemisinin. From 2000 to 2015, a period in which artemisinin-based combination therapy became the leading treatment for malaria, death rates from the disease declined globally by 60%. Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Omura and Irish-born American parasitologist William C. Campbell won for their discovery of the drug avermectin, a derivative of which, ivermectin, became central to the prevention and treatment of major parasitic infections in humans and other animals. By 2015, treatment programs centred on the use of ivermectin had produced dramatic declines in the incidence of river blindness (onchocerciasis) in countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, places where the disease had long been endemic and a significant source of debilitating illness.

Satoshi Omura

Yomiuri Shimbun/AP Images

Tu Youyou

Reuters/Landov

William C. Campbell

Mary Schwalm/AP Images

Tu’s Nobel Prize-winning research was initiated in the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, when the Chinese government appointed her to lead a secret program known as Project 523. The project was established at the request of China’s ally North Vietnam, which had suffered heavy losses of soldiers from malarial disease. Tu and her project team searched ancient Chinese medical texts, identifying some 2,000 folk remedies claimed to be effective against malaria-like illnesses. After testing 380 plant extracts for activity against malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites, they discovered qinghao, or the sweet wormwood plant (Artemisia annua), from which they isolated an extract that rid Plasmodium parasites from the blood of mice and monkeys. In subsequent clinical studies, the extract reduced fever and parasite burden in the blood of infected humans. In 1972 Tu and colleagues successfully isolated the active compound in the extracts, naming it qinghaosu. More than three decades later, artemisinin-based combination drug therapies became the first-line treatment for malaria, recommended by the World Health Organization.

Omura’s research was concentrated on microorganisms, particularly soil bacteria, from which he isolated compounds that had the potential to be developed into pharmaceuticals. In the mid-1970s, while working as a professor at Kitasato University in Japan, he discovered a new soil bacterium, Streptomyces avermitilis. Realizing that the organism likely produced chemical substances of pharmacological value, he sent a culture of the bacterium to Merck Research Laboratories in the U.S. There Campbell, a Merck scientist, tested compounds isolated from the organism for activity against an infectious nematode, Nematospiroides dubius. The work resulted in the discovery of a new family of compounds called avermectins. Campbell and colleagues at Merck modified the avermectin structure, which led to the generation of ivermectin. In animals, ivermectin drastically reduced the production of microfilariae (larvae) by threadlike nematodes. Studies in humans showed that the drug killed microfilariae produced by the infectious parasites that cause river blindness and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis), another debilitating tropical disease. Ivermectin also was widely used in the prevention of microfilariae infections in livestock and other animals, notably heartworm disease in cats and dogs.

Tu was born on Dec. 30, 1930, in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China. She earned a degree (1955) from Beijing Medical College and then joined the Institute of Chinese Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (from 2005, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences). She was trained (1959–62) in the use of traditional Chinese medicine, knowledge that she later applied in the discovery of artemisinin.

Omura was born on July 12, 1935, in Yamanashi prefecture, Japan. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1958) from the University of Yamanashi and Ph.D.’s (1968 and 1970) from the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo University of Science. Omura worked as a research associate (1963–65) at the University of Yamanashi and later at the Kitasato Institute. While completing his Ph.D. studies, he became a professor at Kitasato University. He was named professor emeritus (2007) and distinguished emeritus professor (2013) at Kitasato.

Campbell was born on June 28, 1930, in Ramelton, Ire. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1952) from Trinity College in Dublin and a Ph.D. (1957) from the University of Wisconsin. He joined the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research in New Jersey as a research assistant and later became (1976) the senior director of basic parasitology and served (1984–90) as a senior scientist and the director of assay research and development. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1962.